The Phoenix in Flight (27 page)

Eusabian favored Anaris with a wintry smile, and pressed a
button on a small table beside him. A side door opened to admit the lean figure
of Evodh, the lacquered karra-patterns on his skull gleaming in the light from
Arthelion.

Disgust surged in Anaris. Here was another thing he had not
missed about daily life on Dol’jhar.

“Your first lesson commences now.” Eusabian motioned to
Evodh. “It will last as many days as it takes to purge from you this weakness.”

The last time Anaris had seen what his father laughably
called his physician—who was nothing more, or less, than a torturer—had been
the month after Anaris’s arrival home, when he, his father and the principal
members of the Household had gathered to witness the flaying of his last living
sibling, his sister Damar.

Anaris had always hated Damar. Distance, and age, had
brought the realization that she had never been sane even by the standards of
his homeland, but when he left as a sixteen-year-old, his primary emotion had
been relief to finally escape Damar’s predilection for lying in wait to ambush
and torture him unless he could fight free. A habit their father had regarded
as excellent training for both.

So Anaris had been training in close-in fighting ever since
he was ten.

Evodh had his flaying knife in one hand as the other grasped
Lelanor’s arm above the elbow. She gave a frightened gasp and twisted away from
him, running straight to Anaris’s arms.

Evodh strode forward. As the pesz mas’hadni reached for her,
Anaris grabbed his arm and applied an Ulanshu kinesic, sending the man reeling
across the room to bounce off a wall and fall to the floor, tangled in his own
robes. His expression was mostly distorted rage, but shock as well. No one had
dared touch him for decades, no doubt.

Anaris suppressed the impulse to laugh, stepped quickly to Lelanor’s
side, ignoring the guards closing in. He gently took her face between his hands
as she turned to him.

“Don’t worry, heart of my heart, I will not let them hurt
you.”

He had pitched his voice to sound sincere, and felt her
relax against him. He bent down and kissed her deeply, lingeringly, caressing
her smooth back even as he heard his father’s growl of anger and disgust, and
the thump of boots as the Tarkans ringed them.

Anaris felt her respond to him, melting into his embrace,
her tongue seeking his hotly in a denial of their surroundings. As her arms
glided down his back, he brought his hands up toward her head in a final
caress. Then he slipped his
peshakh
out of his sleeve and thrust its
razor-sharp blade deep into the back of her neck. The blade slipped
resistlessly between her vertebrae, and she passed into death with only the
faintest of tremors.

He tasted blood in her mouth as she slumped against him.
After laying her gently on the floor, he straightened up.

As the guards closed around Anaris, their faces blanching at
the rage apparent in Eusabian’s face, Anaris smiled mockingly at his father.
“Death will come for us both in the end, father mine, but only one of us can
grasp its hilt.”

o0o

Moira’s ninth birthday was the best ever, until the
black-clad soldiers came.

Earlier in the week her parents had surprised her by
promising to take her to see the Havroy, years earlier than was customary. That
morning her father brought flowers from the Palace for her to present to the
Havroy, from the gardens he tended for the Panarch.

“Some of these are from planets so far away that their suns
are never seen in the skies of the Mandala,” he said.

Their colors and scents were dizzying. Moira inhaled deeply
as he laid them in her arms. “Do they miss their sunlight?” she asked, thinking
of the Havroy.

Her father smiled. “I don’t know, little one. I try to make
them happy here.” His eyes looked sad above his smile, and he turned his head
to look toward the hill that stood between their cottage and the distant
Palace.

Moira carried the flowers into the kitchen, where her mother
was assembling a picnic basket, followed by the attentive gaze of their
black-and-brown dog, Popo. “Look, Mother. I’ll bet the Havroy has never seen
flowers like these before.” Indeed, some of them were very strange; the
sweetest-smelling ones looked like a nest of spotted snakes.

Her mother smiled at her as she packed the last of the food
away. There were dark circles under her eyes. “Women come from every one of the
Thousand Suns to see her, Moira. I’m sure she’s seen much stranger. What
matters is what’s in your heart when you lay them at her feet.”

Just then her father came in, and her mother continued, “Why
don’t you go and put on your good sandals and then get some snacks for Popo so
he can have a picnic, too.” As she went down the hallway to her room she could
hear a snatch of conversation from her parents.

“... there’s nothing we can do,” came her father’s voice.

“And the Palace said to go about our business as usual.” Her
mother’s reply seemed to ask a question, though her words didn’t.

It was only a short flight to Havroy Bay in their aircar.
Moira sat up front with her father, leaning close to the windscreen to watch
the cloud-dappled fields and scattered homes glide beneath them. Then, as they
skimmed over a range of low hills, the horizon flattened to a ruler-straight
line separating gray-blue from sky-blue and they swooped to a landing on the
edge of a golden crescent of beach.

The hot sand sifted through her toes as they walked toward
the sea. Popo ran ahead of them and back, kicking up a spatter of sand that
made them blink.

Moira clutched her flowers to her chest, looking about at
the many groups of people dotting the beach, bright in holiday costumes. Some
wore clothing she’d only seen in culture chips, or on vids from the DataNet,
and some wore nothing at all. Their voices echoed the splashing waves, only
some of the words coming clear.

She stared with interest at two people in particular, a man
and a woman. They were so tall that they would have had to stand bent over
inside Moira’s home. Their skin was a glossy black instead of normal brown,
their slanted eyes green, and their long straight hair a blazing reddish gold
like the morning sun.

The woman pointed at Popo standing next to her, said
something to the man. Moira caught the work “Arkad,” and grinned in pride. The
Panarch himself had given Popo to her mother when she came home from the Navy,
but he was Moira’s dog. She looked down at Popo pacing easily at her side: as
usual when there were crowds of people around, he was watching her face
intently, only occasionally glancing around.

“This looks like a good spot,” said her father finally, and
busied himself setting up the sunshade.

Its frail, silvery fabric billowed in the soft breeze,
ballooning up into an open-sided dome over them as her father stroked the
static-tabs at its base. Her mother unrolled the sheet-like
bas;
it
vibrated with a hum, smoothing the sand lumps underneath, then flattened into a
rug.

Her father came up beside Moira. “Doesn’t look like much of
a crowd today. You should have a few moments to yourself with her.” Her mother
came up beside them and slipped her arm through her father’s.

“Silver lining,” she said, but Moira was too intent on what
lay ahead to wonder what her words meant.

As they walked toward the small crowd ahead, leaving Popo to
watch their belongings, her father smiled again. “Do you remember what you said
the first time you saw a picture of the Havroy?”

Moira nodded. “I was sad because I thought they left all the
people like her behind on Lost Earth.” They had joined a short line of people,
all holding flowers. The tall black people with the red hair were just in
front. Moira could smell a sweet, tangy scent coming from them. She tried to
peer around to catch a glimpse of the Havroy, but there were too many people
ahead.

Moira looked up at her parents. “There aren’t any people
like her in the Thousand Suns, are there?”

“No,” her father replied.

“We’ve found many strange people, but never any like her,”
her mother said, moving closer to her father, who looked up at the sky,
frowning.

He slipped his arm around her, then shook his head and
smiled again. “And that’s as it should be. She means much more to us because
she’s the only one.” Then he squatted down on the sand next to her and took
Moira’s hand in his. His fingers were rough and warm, and Moira could see the
traces of dirt around his fingernails that he could never get out.

“Moira, you’re a little too young to really understand,
but—” He glanced at the sky again. “But we thought it was time.”

“I know,” she said happily. “Niona was really jealous. Her
parents said she’d have to wait till her twelfth birthday.”

He nodded, opened his mouth, then pressed his lips together
in a line. “That’s what is usual,” he said finally.” But we are doing it now.
So you must listen carefully to your mother.”

He stood up and her mother sat down on her heels next to
Moira. “Do you remember what I told you about symbols?”

Moira nodded. “They’re like pictures for stories that are
too big for words.”

Her mother hugged her, then let her go, keeping her hands on
Moira’s shoulders. “And sometimes they have stories that go with them, that
help us see things that are too big and old for us to understand any other way.
You know the story of the Havroy, and you know why she sits there, staring out
to sea, forever unable to return home.”

Mother’s eyes brightened with little glints of sunlight—and
so did Father’s. “The Havroy is a story about us: you, and me, and Father, and
all the people on this beach, and throughout the Thousand Suns.”

“And Popo, too?”

Mother nodded. “And Popo, too, and kittens, and horses, and
even the trees in the Garden of the Ancients.” She took Moira’s hand in hers
and squeezed gently. Her fingers were smooth and cool. “None of us can go home
again. We left our home many many years ago, and we can never go back. Just
like her. That’s why we brought her with us, to remind us of Lost Earth.” The
brightness in her eyes spilled over, but her fingers wiped the droplets away
before they could fall.

The line ahead of them had thinned away, the people behind
them waiting patiently. Her mother stood up and touched the flowers in Moira’s
arms. “And these are the bright stories of our lives in the Thousand Suns—all
the beauty and strangeness of our worlds.” She straightened. “Go, daughter,
cast them on the sea foam at the feet of the Havroy and look long into her
face.”

A little frightened by her mother’s seriousness, Moira
walked toward the water’s edge. There was a bubble of solitude around the
Havroy, and the sand was carpeted with blossoms cast up by the advancing tide.
Moira walked around in front of her and then stopped. Though she recognized the
Havroy from the vids, those had not prepared her for the meeting.

Moira took a cautious step, ignoring the cold water that
ruffled over her shoes and soaked her feet as she gazed up into the long, sad
face. She knew that the Havroy was made of bronze, and she’d seen the way the
sun glinted a warm brown like her own skin along the smooth curves of her body
in some places, and in other places—the flowing locks of hair that met at the
nape of the Havroy’s neck, then fell onto her back, and on the hand that rested
on one leg, and on the other that rested on the rock—the colors were rough
blues and aqua. Verdigris, the teacher had called those blue colors.

The teacher had said once that time and tides and wind had
worn away some of the Havroy’s face, but she still looked sad to Moira, who
wondered if the blue streaks below her eyes were tears.

Moira wished she could climb up on the rock and lay her
flowers in the Havroy’s lap, but there was no way to climb, and maybe it
wouldn’t be right to disturb her as she sat on the rock, her legs bent at the
knees.

The sea rushed about Moira’s feet, tickling them with foam
and flowers as she struggled to understand a sorrow too big for words, almost
too big for her heart, and she let the flowers fall before the statue. A
hissing wave of sea foam lifted them from the sand and carried them up the
beach past the Havroy, leaving her finned feet garlanded with the offering of
the Panarch’s gardens as the water withdrew. Then Moira wiped her eyes and held
up her hand, wishing she could wipe the tears off the statue’s cheek.

Moira stood there a while longer, until she became aware of
a thin whine that slowly overwhelmed the mournful sighing of the placid waves
of Havroy Bay. Movement caught her eyes; farther up the beach people gazed out
to sea in alarm. Then a giant voice shattered the calm summer day.

“ATTENTION! PLEASE CLEAR THE BEACH! DO NOT GATHER YOUR
BELONGINGS. LEAVE IMMEDIATELY!”

She twisted around. A sleek silver aircar with the Sun and
Phoenix blazoned on it arrowed in across the bay and banked to turn. A green
finger of light reached out from the land to touch it and the aircar
disintegrated in a flare of bloody light and black smoke. A large piece of
glowing metal shrieked through the air and slammed to the ground near Moira, spattering
her with hot water and sand. It lay hissing in a small crater, the blossoms
around it withering to brown rags.

Her mother ran forward and grabbed her, carrying her up the
beach. Her father used his shoulder to push through the milling crowd of people
now shouting in fear and confusion as a line of black-clad soldiers appeared on
the crest of the low hills behind the beach. They made no move, watching with
unfriendly faces and holding their weapons at the ready as the crowd halted at
the landward edge of the sand. They were close enough that Moira could see a
red fist on their uniforms.

The tall black man with the red hair stepped forward, his
hands raised, palms out. “We intend no resistance,” he called out in Uni. “Will
you please—”